Beau Geste

The spring 1998 seasonal opening of P.S. 1 (The Institute of Art and Urban Resources) in Long Island City, New York, represented the culmination of the “international studio program” for the contemporary art center. There, an array of young artists from Europe, Latin America, Asia, the United States, and Canada displayed a variety of work. What was striking was the general disinterest in traditional forms of painting and sculpture; instead, there was an inordinate adherence to installation, photography, appropriation, performance, and video. This admixture of media-based art has become the current international style, and it has eroded the specificity of national difference.

Figure 1.

Doris Salcedo, Unland: irreversible witness, 1995–98. Wood, cloth, metal, and hair; 44 x 98 x 35 inches. Photo: David Heald, courtesy New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Figure 2.

Jia Hongshen in Frozen. Photo: Courtesy International Film Circuit.

These thoughts came back when confronted with such recent artworks as the Chinese film Frozen and the sculptural installation of the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, Unland. What are we to make of these works, which, on the surface, seem minimalist in conception and execution? Are we supposed to infer sociological and political meanings, simply because of the nationality of the artists? What, in fact, are these works supposed to mean?

To begin with Unland: the installation consists of three long wooden tables. To take the second of the three pieces, Unland: irreversible witness (1995–98), the table is a long wooden one, made from the conjunction of two tables, from which a metal object obtrudes on one end. When you approach the table, you can see that the top of the table is painstakingly threaded with hairs across the width of the table. (The other pieces are Unland: invisible witness and Unland: the orphan’s tunic, also composed of wood, cloth and hair.)

An immediate analogy with Salcedo’s work would be Jackie Winsor, whose work shows an incredibly labor-intensive application of process. Winsor’s minimal forms find their meaning in the formalist assumptions of a modernist aesthetic. Winsor took Minimalism, and replaced the machine-tooled repetition (as exemplified in Donald Judd’s boxes and Carl Andre’s floor pieces) with hand-crafted process. One of her most famous pieces is bound square (1972), in which four logs are bound into a square by hemp rope. The intensive physicality of Winsor’s work is accentuated by the obsessive process on display: it’s obvious that the sculptures had to be worked on, and this intensive handcrafting creates a sense of monumentality. (This is apparent in the retrospective of Winsor’s sculptures which was on display at P.S. 1 from October through June, 1997–98.) But Winsor’s meanings are found in the terms of formalism: scale, process, repetition, density, and natural versus manufactured materials. Winsor, along with Joel Shapiro one of the most influential of post-Minimal sculptors, derives meaning from the tension in her work between her hands-on craftsmanship and the rigor of the elemental forms. Doris Salcedo would seem to be developing her work in the terms set out by Winsor, as do the sculptors Helene Brandt and Ursula von Rydingsvard.

However, in the case of Salcedo, there is the overlay of ulterior meaning, extrapolated from the cultural context of her nationality. As a citizen of Colombia, a country that remains torn by political violence, as well as a country with economic and social extremes, Salcedo has seen her work interpreted in terms of a commentary, however oblique, on the political realities of Colombian society. Once this potential meaning is extrapolated from her work, the muteness of the objects becomes witness to the muteness of the oppressed, thereby providing an emotive and a metaphysical dimension to the simple, if painstaking, art objects. The...